Chipotle is a fast-ish food mexican restaurant. There is one right outside my office building.

Recently I discovered that Chipotle’s Web site will let me order online through their Don’t Stand in Line feature.

Usually I put the order in fifteen minutes ahead of time or so. When I arrive at the restaurant to pick up my burrito, I walk past a line that usually wraps around the store. The worker at the register grabs my pre-made order and takes my money.

Chipotle DSL has worked well for me. The employees are still a little confused by it, which makes me think there aren’t a whole lot of people taking advantage of it.

A friend and I had an idea over two years ago to help Portland restaurants provide this service to its customers. I still think that’s a great idea (but you know what I think of ideas), especially with a company like Chipotle helping people be more comfortable with it.

On a long drive recently, I listened to Gene Wilder’s autobiography, Kiss Me Like A Stranger. He bounced around from topic to topic in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. As part of this, he pointed out some of the strange connections that set his life in a certain direction.

If I hadn’t been miscast “in Mother Courage, I wouldn’t have met Anne Bancroft. If I hadn’t met Anne Bancroft, I wouldn’t have met Mel Brooks. If I hadn’t met Mel Brooks, I would probably be a patient in some neuropsychiatric hospital today, looking through the bars of a physical therapy window as I made wallets.”

Steve Harper calls this The Ripple Effect. And he’s looking for your Ripple stories.

It might be unfair and cliche to poke fun at Pets.com. Feel free to substitute your own extravagant Bubble company. While most spent and spent on fancy office equipment, Superbowl ads, and the like, Amazon was flying by relatively on the cheap.

Greg Linden has started a new feature on his site where he shares stories of the early days at Amazon (1997). Today, he brings us the story of the door desks, furniture that probably is cheaper than a FedEx desk.

Yet Amazon became a poster child of the Web and its new lifestyle. Amazon’s founder was Time’s person of the year. Most importantly, Amazon made it through the tech crash. The door desk is a symbol of the frugality it took to stay in business. It shows that even big ideas can be bootstrapped.

Greg mentions an earthquake in Seattle in 2001. He and his co-workers were happy to have heavy doors under which to duck and cover. I’m also happy they had their makeshift furniture. The frugality probably saved Amazon before the earthquake took its shot. The web is better with Amazon around.

I’ve been doing “web stuff” in some form since 1995. I made websites, I put my thoughts online. When blogs first became popular, around 1999, I didn’t get it. A blog is an ordinary web page.

Around the same time, I helped start a college radio station on the Internet. We played music, talked about campus issues, and more. We certainly had the equipment to podcast, if there had been such a term. But, podcasting is just an ordinary MP3 file.

My most important point here is that I have a history of being dead wrong.

Web pages and MP3 files are old technology (relative to the fast-moving web), but they’re being used in new ways. Webheads invented a number of tiny tweaks that make blogs and podcasts more popular. RSS is used to automatically keep track of new posts or episodes. Structured content makes blogs and podcasts easier to search.

Blogs are more than just web pages. Podcasts are more than just MP3 files. Everything new is old. It’s time I start thinking before I use the word “just.”

Blend is one of my favorite coffee shops in Portland. It’s really easy to hang out there for hours. With more time comes a necessary trip to the toilet. For two years the lock to the bathroom opened the opposite direction. To move the deadbolt to the left, I had to turn the key to the right. This confused me for a long time, until finally I got used to it.

About a year ago, they fixed this broken interface. Now the deadbolt works as anyone would expect. Yet, every time I use their restroom, I still turn the key to the right before going the correct direction.

Do bad interfaces stick around because the user base is used to them? If the interface is improved, new users are happy, but will old users revolt?

This is a real question for the folks at Adobe (formerly Macromedia). I have long considered Macromedia’s user interfaces to be difficult to understand, but now I’m used to it. Will Adobe “fix” Macromedia’s UI now that it owns the products?